Freud And The Passions

Freud's thinking about the unconscious has always been seen to be more about representations than affects. When it came to the passions of the transference and the demands of his hysterical patients, Freud was always more interested, wanted to move the focus away from the transference, and onto dreams. Hidden wishes more than manifest ones were what captured his imagination and style. This book returns to the repressed theory of passions in Freud's own thinking, arguing that the repression, fixation and rhythmic movement of affects make up the roots and branches of psychoanalytic thinking. We can think of Freud's unconscious affects as a tree, with the most passionate and primitive affects that make up the core of our psychic life, moving and branching out into more elaborated emotions and representations. So what moves this tree: the house of our first passions? How we move the tree of our affects, or leave it, is integral to Freud's understanding of sexuality and the Oedipal Complex.

In this challenging collection of essays, the noted historian and philosopher of science John Forrester delves into the disputes over Freud's dead body. With wit and erudition, he tackles questions central to our psychoanalytic century's ways of thinking and living, including the following: Can one speak of a morality of the psychoanalytic life? Are the lives of both analysts and patients doomed to repeat the incestuous patterns they uncover? What and why did Freud collect? Is a history of psychoanalysis possible? By taking nothing for granted and leaving no cliché of psychobabble--theoretical or popular--unturned, Forrester gives us a sense of the ethical surprises and epistemological riddles that a century of tumultuous psychoanalytical debate has often obscured. In these pages, we explore dreams, history, ethics, political theory, and the motor of psychoanalysis as a scientific movement. Forrester makes us feel that the Freud Wars are not merely a vicious quarrel or a fashionable journalistic talking point for the late twentieth century. This hundred years' war is an index of the cultural and scientific climate of modern times. Freud is indeed a barometer for understanding how we conduct our different lives.

A novel about Sigmund Freud--the complex man whose life was a tumultuous drama of courage, conflict, love, and daring, as he ripped away the shrouds of secrecy from our shames, our guilts, our sexuality, and our human potential.

" Eroticism is a constant presence in modern society, encompassing almost every aspect of our daily lives. It is a product of one of the major commercial and political enterprises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the cultivation of desire – desire for sex, desire for wealth, desire for entertainment. Paul Rutherford's A World Made Sexy looks at modern civilization's ongoing project to manufacture and encourage public wants, building a utopia where just about everyone (who is affluent) dreams, plays, and, of course, shops. A World Made Sexy uses museum exhibitions, art, books, magazines, films, and television to examine the rise and purpose of eroticism, first in America but soon across the affluent world. Starting with a brief foray into the representation of history as past pornography, Rutherford explores a sexual liberation movement shaped by the ideas of Marx and Freud, the erotic styles of Salvador Dali and pop art, the pioneering use of publicity as erotica by Playboy and other products, and the growing concerns of cultural critics over the emergence of a regime of stimulation. In one case study, Rutherford pairs James Bond and Madonna in order to examine the link between eroticism and aggression. He further details how television advertising after 1980 constructed a theatre of the libido to entice the buying public, and concludes by situating the Eros project in the wider context of Michel Foucault's account of the administration of life, and specifically sexuality, during the modern era. A World Made Sexy is about power and pleasure, emancipation and domination, and the relationship between the personal passions and social controls that have crafted desire. "

Freud's invention of psychoanalysis was based on his own desire to know something about the unconscious, but what have been the effects of this original desire on psychoanalysis ever since? How has Freud's desire created symptoms in the history of psychoanalysis? Has it helped or hindered its transmission? Exploring these questions brings Serge Cottet to Lacan's concept of the psychoanalyst's desire: less a particular desire like Freud's and more a function, this is what allows analysts to operate in their practice. It emerges during analysis and is crucial in enabling the analysand to begin working with the unconscious of others when they take on the position of analyst themselves. What is this function and how can it be traced in Freud's work? Cottet's book, first published in 1982 and revised in 1996, is a classic of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is not only a scholarly study of Freud and Lacan, but a thought-provoking introduction to the key issues of Lacanian psychoanalysis.